Sunday, January 8, 2017

Beware of ideologues offering one-size-fits-all solutions to
every problem. Case in point: the current mania over leaning in. Facebook COO
Sheryl Sandberg advises women to lean in, thus to pretend to be tough when
negotiating salaries. By her lights, women earn less than men because they are not
aggressive negotiators.

Sandberg does not understand that other
factors might enter the equation. (See yesterday’s post.) She does not
understand that different jobs might add different value to companies. She does not understand that many women would rather work less and have more time for family. And she
does not understand that, in the end, there is no such thing as equal work.

So, Sandberg advises women to lean in, thus to be more
direct, to be more confrontational, to get in their boss’s faces. Perhaps
Sandberg did not really want women to become more confrontational, but the
concept of “leaning in” involves posturing. It involves macho posturing.

To lean in is to confront. Yet, when you are constitutionally
weaker than another person it is not smart to be more confrontational. A quick
glance at Darwin would tell you that those who adopt self-defeating behaviors
tend to have lower survival rates. Being confrontational is not in female DNA.
Telling women to do something that is not in their DNA will set them up for
failure.

Besides, macho posturing is not a good tactic for men
either. Your salary does not depend on tough talk and bluffing. It depends on
the value you add to the company-- especially to the extent that you can
document it. If you enter a negotiation using threats and intimidation, you
might negotiate yourself out of a job.

Such was the case of a great Sandberg friend, former New
York Times executive editor, Jill Abramson. When Abramson discovered that her
male predecessor was earning more than she was she confronted her boss, Arthur
Sulzberger. He fired her on the spot.

Was she fired for leaning in? Not exactly. My sources tell
me that editors get themselves fired for being poor managers, for losing
control of the newsroom. Apparently, Abramson was an incompetent manger. And
she did not even know it. She was not leading or managing, but was posturing,
playing a part, looking the role. Instead of leaning in she should have taken a
few lessons in good management technique.

And now we have the strange case of Megyn Kelly, another
Sandberg friend and acolyte. You know the story so I will spare you the details.
For reasons that escape us all, Kelly decided to make her salary negotiations
with Fox News a public spectacle. Normally, such parleys take place in private.
By making them public Kelly was leaning in. But she was also threatening a company
and its boss that had made her what she has become. She may not have known it,
but she was pursuing a political agenda.

Many people at Fox were distressed at Kelly’s tactics.
First, because she was making the company look bad. Second, because she was
threatening senior management. Third, because she made it look like it was all about her.

Many of Kelly’s fans—who appreciated her fair and balanced
approach-- were disturbed to see her become a feminist heroine. Many of them
will no longer watch her on NBC.

They understood that the process was more about hurting Fox
News than about gaining a better contract for Kelly. After all, the existence
of Fox News has been a thorn in the side of those who believe that they should
hold a monopoly over the marketplace of ideas. You know, roughly like the one
they hold in American universities.

In the end Kelly turned down $25 million from Fox in favor
of approximately $15 million from NBC. True enough, she is moving from cable to
network. And she will apparently be getting an afternoon show… thus making her
the new Oprah. If you have ever seen Kelly’s show you will know that she will
never become the next Oprah. That is not where her talent lies.

Several television critics have already pointed out that the
audience for afternoon television differs significantly from the audience for
Fox News prime time. Aside from negotiating herself into a far lower salary,
Kelly might have damaged her career.

She said she was doing it for her children because she did
not want to be working when they came home from school. And yet, Bill O’Reilly tapes his 8:00 p.m. show in the afternoon. Is it
possible that Fox refused to offer the same terms to its rising female star?

So, Kelly leaned in. She will be paid significantly less.
She will have less immediate clout in public debate. She has alienated her
viewers but will become a feminist heroine.

I have said it before and will say it again. Leaning in is
bad advice. It is bad advice for women and it is bad advice for men. Never take
advice from people whose minds have been captured by ideology.

That being said, Olga Khazan offers an intriguing look at
female negotiating tactics in the Atlantic.

She does not mention “leaning in”—why agitate the goddess?—but
she points out that sometimes women choose not to negotiate because they know
that they will lose. Case in point-- not mentioned by Khazan— Jill Abramson. If
Abramson had understood how weak her position was—she should have-- she would
not have tried to negotiate a salary increase. Only an ideologue, pulling her
strings, would have pushed her to overplay her hand and to lose what is
arguably the most powerful job in journalism.

Khazan presents the issue well:

One of
the most common explanations for the gender-wage gap is that women simply don’t
ask for higher salaries, while men do. The idea that one should “always
negotiate your salary” is standard college-counselor fare. In a blog post about
the gender wage gap, the U.S. Department of Labor suggests women “aim higher
and negotiate better” as one of the possible remedies.

And at
first, it seems innocuous, right? Negotiating is one of the few ways workers in
today’s economy can secure better salaries and benefits. Women, the thinking
goes, should do it or risk being ground up by the merciless gears of
capitalism. Or, you know, make at
most 93 cents to the dollar.

Women
do tend to negotiate less than men do, and some researchers suggest that’s
because they justifiably fear they’ll violate societal norms of demure,
communal female behavior—and be punished
for it. (As one study depressingly found,
“Perceptions of niceness and demandingness explained resistance to female
negotiators.”) So how should women proceed? In a new paper in NBER, three
economics and management researchers find that advising women to “always
negotiate” might not be in their best interest—because, it seems, women seem to
already know when negotiations won’t work out in their favor.

As Khazan frames the issue, those who tell women to lean
in are disrespecting women. They are assuming that women are dupes of the
patriarchy and dupes of their capitalist oppressors.

Many women do not negotiate or choose a different
negotiating style because they are smart. They evaluate their options and
analyze the situation. They exercise their judgment and do what is best for
them. When they use a one-size-fits-all tactic they invariably fail. Not only
that, but they damage their careers.

When women are disinclined to negotiate, they should not
negotiate. This was demonstrated in a research study. Khazan presents the conclusion:

Women
were avoiding the negotiations they knew would not end well for them. The likelihood
of women losing money tripled if they were forced to negotiate, rather than
given the option. “By opting out of negotiations, women are avoiding
substantial financial losses,” the study authors write. “That is, women know
when to ask.”

Unlike
women, men were not particularly likely to opt out of negotiations that they
would probably lose. Thus, being forced to negotiate was neither bad nor good
for the men, but it was bad for women, says Christine Exley, an assistant
professor at Harvard Business School who co-authored the study along with
Muriel Niederle of Stanford University and Lise Vesterlund at the University of
Pittsburgh.

Strangely enough, being pushed to negotiate was neither good
or bad for men, but it was bad for women. So, the average woman knows what is best
for her. Sheryl Sandberg does not.

Moreover, the authors explain, negotiating is a learned
skill. You are not born knowing how to do it. There is no magical formula, no
clever trick, either mental or postural, that will make you a better
negotiator.

The basis for a good negotiation is a command of one’s
brief, a full understanding of all the issues in play. If you are negotiating
for a better salary you should be able to quantify your contribution. Thus, you
will be asking your boss to compensate you according to your contribution, not
as a function of your macho posturing.

And you should never, never negotiate in public. It doesn’t
just make your boss and your company look bad. It makes you look like an
ingrate who has a personal agenda, who is in it for the self-aggrandizement.

Recall that while Megyn Kelly was making herself look
foolish Rupert Murdoch declared that she was not irreplaceable. She should have
taken that as a sign that she had overplayed her hand. In most businesses, no
one is irreplaceable.

Curiously, when Kelly signed off last Friday night, she
thanked all of the people who had watched her show. If memory serves, she
failed to thank the Fox executives who had made her a star. Disloyalty is not
an attractive quality.

Perhaps she has hurt Fox News. (After all, that seems to
have been the only point of the spectacle she put on.) Future ratings will
tell. Perhaps she is going to become a star on afternoon television. And yet, however
talented she is, she does not have Oprah’s warmth and generosity.

The moral of the story: beware of ideologues bearing advice.
They are advancing their cause, not your career. And, I guarantee you, if you
take their advice and it does not work out they will always be at the ready to
blame someone else. Being an ideologue means never saying you’re sorry.

11 comments:

Re ideology, I've been impressed with a remark made by French writer Andre Maurois:

"Like all intelligent men who are not in any way creative, Sir Robert Peel was dangerously sympathetic towards the creations of others. Incapable of formulating a system, he threw himself voraciously on those he came across, and applied them more vigorously than would their inventors."

I don't know enough about Robert Peel to assess whether or not Maurois's judgment of him is fair or not, but I think it's an excellent point in general...but I would change the formulation slightly.

Those who tend to be excessively devoted to particular intellectual systems, it seems to me, are those who* concretize abstractions*..who think that some conceptual model, which may be useful under particular circumstances, is actually something real and tangible. Falling under the sway of abstractions, when one doesn't really understand how abstractions work, can be dangerous. Whether a person who thinks this way is "intelligent but uncreative" or really not all that intelligent in the first place is, I guess, mainly a matter of definition. But as more and more people find themselves in jobs where they work with symbols, rather than with tangible objects, it becomes increasingly important that people learn to use abstractions in the right way--as servants rather than as masters...and to keep those who misuse abstractions out of policymaking jobs.

" If you are negotiating for a better salary you should be able to quantify your contribution..."

A key element in any negotiation is a good assessment of the value of your product or service in the domain of your buyer. Your personal feelings about its worth don't matter. That's why your kid's refrigerator art goes unauctioned and Ares' blog goes unvisited.

Even more important is delivering what you sell. That's why conmen need a new mark for every sale, but a successful consultant will have a history of repeat customers.

How many of us are willing to do this as individuals? Not many. When we have a posse, or men with guns backing us up, courage is less demanding. Yet the Union soldiers heading up the slope at Fredericksburg and the Confederates heading across the field during Pickett's Charge knew courage, because they faced impossible odds... yet they did it. Today we say those Union soldiers were stupid because they didn't understand the statistical insanity of their choice, and that Confederates were bad people because they were fighting for slavery. How quaint.

I'd like to challenge this. Emotion is powerful. Personal feelings do matter.

Ultimately, the seller who expects more from the exchange must have the courage to ask for what he wants, and then be responsible for his part in the outcome. We're talking about a medium of exchange. The buyer does not hold all the cards. The seller also has a position. They come to a conclusion as to what the value is. Value is different for every transaction. That's how pricing works.

But let me say again: this demands responsibility. If you stand for your value and walk away empty-handed, you may be disappointed. That is natural. You may even be angry. But you are responsible for that outcome. Why? Because you were an actor in a negotiation. The other actor has free will as well, and chose to withdraw. Disappointing, sure. But not unfair. They have their interest. We have lost this idea today. Today, we walk away cursing and blaming our prospective buyer for a whole litany of reasons, excuses, explanations and rationalizations. We have forgotten responsibility. I don't care if someone demands $10,000 for a piece of refrigerator art, but it's not unfair if someone doesn't pay. Your progeny's work isn't worth it. Says who? Well, someone else. What other reason is there?

Most people today are not willing to be responsible for their choices because they have been hoodwinked into believing that all beliefs, all ideas, all desires, all wants, all choices are the same. That's complete, total, utter bullshit. Unfortunately, when everyone is special and everyone gets a trophy, no one understands the idea of value. They don't know what value is. They just know what they want, and you're going to give it to them. A stadium crowd of Veruca Salts.

What Sheryl Sandberg and others want is a metaphorical "man" (government) to step in and stand up for their honor and value in the marketplace. Perhaps Ms. Sandberg is a tough queen. Probably. But the truth is that the vast majority of the sisterhood is risk-averse and clings to security. Not every woman has a Harvard undergraduate degree (summa cum laude) and MBA (with distinction) to advertise their analytical intelligence. Sandberg is no doubt a Type-A alpha woman who knows what she wants. Experience informs me such people -- male or female -- are in short supply, but moreso with women because of their normative nature, given what packs of women do to other women who get ahead or fall behind (hint: it's not pretty).

Buyers do not hold all the cards, and never have. They have a natural advantage, in that they have something people want: disposable income, or sufficient capital to command discounts on scalable purchases. Ultimately, it is courage that is the largest determinant of success. Whether that courage comes from a deep belief in the worth of what you offer, or the conferring institution of your degree, or the proven value of your wares, it is the defining element of success. Yet Aristotle said taking action in spite of fear was virtuous. O that we all should be courageous.

David stood up to Goliath because he believed in justice, and himself. David took enormous risk, born of courage. Goliath fell.

As the number of women who abuse alcohol and drugs grows one of the reasons for that growth is the bullying of people like Sandberg and feminists. Typical "mean girl" behavior driven by self interests.

There is great power in victimhood within a materialist, Progressive system. The grace of victimhood in pursuit of social justice can engage the power to impoverish bakers, get CEOs fired, allow rioting mobs to destroy private businesses, etc...

"There is great power in victimhood within the materialist, Progreasive system."

They may get goodies within that construct... materiel assistance, as you point out. But that's the "stuff" of so-called progress, determined whatever the Progressive's self-congratulatory ideas of progress are. There's no real test of happiness and its pursuit. Being given stuff is a palliative.

Yet I assert there is no real power available from that place... in being that person. You're a victim, dependent on others. Sure, you may get an Obama phone or continue to be able to pay your cable bill, but I believe people know the truth, no matter how much they might deny it. Fringe benefits provided by SJWs do not feed dignity.